Slashdot Mirror
Tom Reviews 13 LCD Displays
n3r0.m4dski11z noted that Tom's Hardware has a review of 13 LCD Displays
for anyone who has been thinking about making the leap from the CRT to that
fancy shmantsy LCD stuff thats all the rage with the kids these days.
As usual, they do a pretty good job explaining the issues. In this
case comparing CRT and LCD technology, as well as covering a ton of
screens.
When a new story is posted at Tom's, it gets front page status here. Shouldn't there be a "daily updates at well known hardware sites" category for those of us who go to those sites anyways? I just don't see what the point behind Slashdot getting cluttered with a "posting notification" for Tom's, Sharky, Anandtech, etc.
Actually, unless it is Tom himhelft doing the review, Tom's Hardware is widely known for fairly bad reviews. Take a look at:2 6/ index.html
http://www.tomshardware.com/mainboard/01q4/0111
...which says that the KT266a chipset "blows away" the NForce, when the performance differences are right around 2-3%.
Overall, I still like the site and most pf the reviews, though.
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
smart guy, he is reviewing thirteen different monitors, not 13" monitors. or are you jsut trolling?
Moon Macrosystems. Sun's biggest competitor.
Cheers,
-- RLJ
...really needs to get a clue.
"Tom's Hardware is just a website, not a magazine. The testing monitors are reserved for the press."
Sheesh.
They're not 13" monitors, there are 13 monitors. As far as I can tell, most seem to be 15". I haven't seen a 13" LCD for a while now, and doubt it would sell, much less be worth reviewing.
Yes! That guy!
A properly set-up LCD running at its design resolution looks sharp!
"My opinions are my own, and I've got *lots* of them!"
I noticed that we
got more than 10
words per page with
this review, but
not much more!
Moon Macrosystems. Sun's biggest competitor.
I don't know about you guys, but Tom's is one of the prime places I check out for hardware reviews. I don't trust most print sites for the news, like ZDNet, as they easily sell out.
If Samsung thinks Tom's is just an online site, well, they've lost my business. And I really want an LCD. I HATE flicker.
The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it. - G.B. Shaw
THG's complaint about Samsung sure is interesting. From the letter Samsung sent to Tom's:
Tom's Hardware is just a website, not a magazine. The testing monitors are reserved for the press."
Umm, hello? I'd be willing to bet that THG has a higher readership than most hardware oriented print publications. Tom's is damn-near the definitive source for these things, is respected, and well-read. I can't believe Samsung screwed up like this.
Oh well. I've never cared for Samsung much anyway.
- Rev.This is the only piece of hardware I have ever drooled over!
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
Check out one of these, yes it's an Apple Cinema Display, but take a look at one, they are simply amazing, they are a piece of art, yes it requires a $50CND dongle to go from Mac-DVI for PC users, and I am a pc user, but they are so worth the money, they are great monitors.
In addition to the advantages and drawbacks given in this section of the article, color LCD technology is inherently sharper than CRT. Because of the inherent misregistration of the red, green, and blue planes of pixels, it's possible to address sub-pixels individually, resulting in a nearly threefold improvement in the effective horizontal resolution. More info is available here, Slashdot covered it here, and software to sharpen bitmap images on LCDs is available here.
Will I retire or break 10K?
On a related note, Ars Technica recently pushed out a Flat Panel buyer's guide.
As someone who sits in front of computers all day who has a preference for ungodly high resolutions, my laptop has really helped my eyes. I recently got a Dell Laptop with a 15" 1600x1200 LCD display. For years my eyes have not been great. Not bad enough to really need glasses, but enough to bug me every now and then. Since I started using the LCD, I have had ever decreasing eye problems.
The screen is so much sharper than any CRT at high resolutions. I am starting to consider replacing my 21" sony trinitron (sp?) on my home desktop machine with an LCD. I want more screen real-estate than these 13" screens, but the prices keep coming down.
If you have eye problems as a result of using a CRT all day long, I highly recomend a high-res LCD.
-Pete
Soccer Goal Plans
I am on a philips brilliance 150P2 right now and the quality is fantastic. There is a slight blur when you scoll, but it is nothing that stands out unless you are actually looking for it, and even then it is not really a problem and occurs on all LCDs. :)
The best thing about it is being able to pivot the monitor to play vertical mame games vertically. It works great in linux as well
Maybe I missed it in the review - but I didn't notice where they mentioned the dot pitch of the various LCD monitors. They cover technology type, response time, contrast ratio, and price, but I didn't notice any dot pitch ratings.
.25 mm dot pitch for five years, I can't go back to those awful, grainy flat panels.
.24 mm dot pitch). Cost me less than a 17" flat panel, better dot pitch, good refresh. Just had to pull my desk out 6" from the wall to handle it, and that's just fine with me.
I recently had to bite the bullet and buy a new monitor. I considered buying a flat panel screen for a while, but among the (many many) reasons for not buying one was that the dot pitch sucked. After having a 15" Trinitron with a
So, I ended up buying a 19" Trinitron (think it's a
If it ain't broke, it doesn't have enough features yet.
At least the current technology for OLEDs has a problem: has a much shorter lifetime than the other competing technologies -- how would you like it if your monitor "faded out" after 6 months' use (at 40 hours a day, that's about the lifetime of current OLEDs). Sad. :-(
"My opinions are my own, and I've got *lots* of them!"
Apple makes some incredible displays, yet Tom didn't mention any of them. Is this anti-Apple bias or simply an oversight?
It's not as if Apple's monitors only work on their hardware.
I'm pink therefore I'm Spam
I own a Dell Inspiron 8000 with a GORGEOUS 15.1" UltraXGA screen. It's wonderful to look at and sometimes it's even easier on my eyes then my dual 19" CRT system on my workstation.
However, from what I understand about LCD screens is that they need to be mated with particular video cards (digital, of course) in order to even come close to high-quality laptop LCDs. Laptop manufacturers mate the best LCDs with the best, tuned, video cards in order to achieve the best display out there. With a much wider array of desktop LCDs and video cards you'd be hard pressed to be able to perfectly match a digital video card to a LCD display without massive amounts of time, money, and trial-and-error.
Thanks,
--
Matt
Yep! LASER, MODEM, FLOPS, MIPS, SNAFU, BIT (okay, that might be stretching it a little)....
There's 40 hours in a day now? Now I have to buy a new watch....
Samsung's flat-panel product line is fairly easy to summarize, even without a formal review. I looked closely at several different models when upgrading my monitor late last year.
The Samsung 170T is godlike, especially with a DVI connection. It has a 400:1 contrast ratio, 0.26mm dot pitch, and it's bright enough to be painful to look at in dim light. The 160-degree viewing angle will remind you of a CRT. Oddly enough, it's not much more expensive than their (far inferior) 170MP and other 17" models.... which explains why most mail-order houses are usually sold out of the 170T.
I've replaced every CRT monitor in my house (three) with 170Ts, and couldn't be happier. There is only one dead pixel among the three.
Sadly, however, the other Samsung monitors are all junk, no better or worse than everything else in the slush pile at CompUSA. I imagine the 170T is blown away by the 210T, but those are even larger, more expensive, and (probably) harder to find.
Dahlmann tightly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to use, and steps out into the plain.
It looks like from the 'CRT vs. LCD' section in the article that LCDs pretty much suck for accurate pre-press work. (lack of accurate/high quality color, color depth, contrast, and gamma) Which, if I understand things correctly, is a major portion of Apples market. Are the apple LCDs just that much better, or are they leaving the market for pre-press monitors to third parties?
> CRT tube
> ATM machne
> PIN number
> GPS system
> SSN number
> >
> It's fun when acronyms become words.
Hey! You forgot GNU's Not UNIX! ;)
A good LCD monitor will exhibit almost no ghosting in games, will support either standard VGA or DVI, and will have a viewing angle well over 100 degrees.
I'm sure the OLED displays will be insanely awesome and all, but the present-day reality is that the best LCD displays are now reasonably competitive with the best CRTs. You must have been looking at some really cheap LCD monitors -- or some really old ones -- in order to get the impressions you posted.
Dahlmann tightly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to use, and steps out into the plain.
And it is compatible with other things than Macs (as the cinema display is not). The best price I can find on it is $3940; the list is $5370.
Even better is the IBM C220, at about 3Kx2.5K, but it requires a special IBM graphics card and special drivers. Moreover, it runs $21,000.
HW/SW question for slashdotters: For my next system, I'm thinking of getting either a 1920x1440 or a 1600x1200 LCD (probably the VS VP201, instead of the 230--I can afford it better). I like large virtual displays under Linux/XFree86 (currently I'm running 2Kx1.5K that seems to be the most that nVidia will support under XFree86). What graphics card should I choose to be able to get VIRTUAL 3200 2000?
"My opinions are my own, and I've got *lots* of them!"
not to nitpick... okay, to nitpick a little bit.... but DSTN is a passive-matrix LCD technology. Active matrix is TFT.
Oh wait... COM+D monitors rock!
Wait... this is the last time, I promise: .NetD monitors kick ass!
T :-)
---- It puts the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again. It does this whenever it's told.
Why the hell are you dropping your monitor in the first place? You put the monitor on your desk not on your lap! Just because its an LCD doesn't make it a notebook.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
Price. Unless you've been living under a rock, you know that LCDs cost about 5-7 times a comparable CRT
Yes, they're expensive. But getting cheaper, especially the 15" ones. OLEDs won't be any cheaper when they start getting produced, either, I'm sure...
All of my LCDs had a terrible viewing angle - no better than 15 degrees to either side.
I think that's improved dramatically -- most of the units in the review (which I only had time to skim) look like they do 120-160 degrees, not 30 degrees like you seem to have gotten...
OLED products promise to significantly reduce the weight of the display, because they will not require so much glass to produce.
Huh? I'm not sure that they'll really use any less glass, as I'd bet that the OLED screen will be behind some kind of protective screen, anyway. Regardless, as someone else pointed out, OLEDs are way off. And it's not like the LCD panels weigh 50 pounds like the old 21" monitors I used to lug around...
Durability. LCD displays are scads more sensitive to EMF, shock, and time than CRT displays are. Dropping my CRT resulted in a few scratches; dropping an LCD results in a sloppy mess and a couple hundred dollars down the tubes. And who knows if OLEDs won't be just as fragile -- they might be a really thin film that gets torn the second the glass breaks, leaving you with just as useless a monitor (though without the funky LCD ooze).
The same goes for laptops. Solution? Try not to drop it. Seriously. As long as they don't break in normal use (like, say, if your framed MCSE falls off the wall onto it when your office neighbor slamdances the wall), then this isn't that big a deal.
Compatibility. I had problems getting two out of the three LCD monitors to run with Linux. Since they rarely use a standard VGA connector, they require a proprietary video card which sometimes will not have open source driver support.
I really don't understand this one. Almost all displays have at least one standard VGA port. I've seen flat panels on all kinds of systems. There are some with digital video ports, and for those, yes, you need a special card and thus enter driver hell. But (again, I only skimmed) it looked like all the screens the review looked at should support Linux over standard VGA.
What kinds of screens were you trying? Were they all the same make/model, or did you try a sampling? Were they wacky mega-advanced things like the 16x9 SGI panel, or simple stuff you found at CompUSA?
"My opinions are my own, and I've got *lots* of them!"
I'm sure someone at Samsung profoundly regrets the sales lost (both of them) by withholding monitors from Tom.
What's a sig?
Agreed - for now, I'm a CRT bigot, and I'll remain a CRT bigot until such time as LCDs can give me better resolution and better refresh rates (that is, less flicker when scrolling/gaming) than CRTs at a comparable price.
LCDs have gotten good. Damn good. For instance, I'd no longer hesitate to use a laptop as my main "work" computer today.
But for home use - where I'm planning on using it as a computer, TV, DVD player, and gaming box (YMMV, of course), I'm sticking with CRTs.
The limiting factor for CRTs (for me) isn't relative footprint, it's absolute footprint.
That is, if you offered me a choice between a 24" LCD, a 19" CRT, and a 24" CRT, I'd likely go with the 19" CRT, because that's all that fits on my desk unless I start carving holes in the drywall.
If, a year or two from now, someone develops a tech to narrow the depth of the tube and allow that 24" CRT to fit in the same "depth" as a present-day 19" or 17" CRT, I'll choose it over even a 24" LCD. Sure, the hypothetical 24" LCD gives me more desk space -- but that's space behind the screen, which I never use anyways.
(And on the 24" front -- considering the problems inherent with LCDs and wide viewing angles, how are present-technology LCDs ever going to scale beyond 21"?)
Personally, I think we're going to wind up with micromechanical systems and retinal projection in the long run. Isn't the human eyeball's limit something like 4096x4096x32-bit?
Newer Apple LCD's (the ones they could get review versions of in theory) now use a special Apple display connector so they won't work with any other computers besides Apple. I think I saw there might be a DVI converter that a 3rd party makes, but they basically made their 24" Cinema Display Mac only.
I have a 22 inch samsung (not france) CRT monitor. Apart from the fact that the first one failed miserably and Samsung replaced it without a glitch, it works perfectly. Not one burned pixel, perfect color and contrast, 2048*1536 32 bit at 85hz and no distortion. I have seen quite a few LCD monitors, and I AM NOT switching. The difference is just to great. Anything below or equal to 72 hz gives me a headache and I can clearly see it. I wonder how people can work with a 40hz maximum refresh rate and a resolution that is at best 1600*1200 9but for that you have to go in the 18 inch or above LCD and it costs 5000$) .02
Imperium et libertas
Autocracy and freedom
Maybe I'm naive, but I'd say two very relevant qualities of an LCD display, hell any display, are size and resolution.
As far as I can tell, few to none of the "Test Tests" pages provide this information.
The "Conclusion" is actually just a summary of monitor properties with no rankings or opinions gathered presumably from a "review" process. Even then, the summary doesn't include size or resolution.
On the first page, there's no description why these values are not relevant nor significant for the review. Instead, there's three paragraphs regarding why Samsung-France is big and mean for not sending a unit to "review". Not only does that seem like last-page material, it seems unprofessional to even print.
Going back the introductory pages, I did find some references to "only of limited interest for a 15" monitor", and a few other references to "768 pixels". So, after correlating and cross-referencing text from a number of pages in the review, I can make the guess that all the monitors have 15" diagonal with max resolution 1024x768.
Considering the quality of both the review process and the journalism, Samsung was right to not send them a monitor. And, I'm right to resume my practice of never visiting Toms Hardware.
I stopped trusting THG after reading a glowing review of an nVIDIA video card blowing away the competition, while the page itself had a big ol nVIDIA advertisement at the top.
Sure, nVIDIA's hardware truly does rock, but how do we know that the only thing paid for was the little banner ad?
Then again, many, many print magazines pull the exact same shenanigans...
it, Beautifully sharp, good contrast and viewing angle, and only about $600.
"My opinions are my own, and I've got *lots* of them!"
I have been looking to buy a 15" LCD in the near future. I had heard good things about the Samsung but I was disappointed to hear that they refused to provide Tom with a unit.
After looking around their web pages for about ten minutes, I finally was able to find an email address to express my displeasure.
Contact Samsung's PR department.
I believe that Samsung makes the highly regarded Apple Studio monitors, as well.
One question I have (as I read through Tom's article) is why a DVI connection will put you back about $100 more than a similar VGA-only LCD.
- (c) 2018 Hank Zimmerman
The PC case doesn't have to sit on the desktop, but it's a safe argument that the monitor does. Small desk plus 19' CRT means early blindness from sitting two feet away from it, and wrist cramps from having your keyboard crammed on to the same small geography. With a flat panel, you can recover a huge amount of desktop (meatspace desktop, that is) so you can work more comfortably.
Virg
Anyway, I had a then-current and very nice 17" magnavox on eyry, my k6, and a 640x480 lcd on a ~94 thinkpad 486 I'd picked up for $400 to write at night.
I found myself frequently copying the dissertation to floppy so that I could edit onthe sharper screen of the laptop--my eyes teared after several hours on the crt.
There's also the bit about being stranded two days with a deadline, and editing the out-of-date copy on the laptop, creating a diff, and patching the desktop copy, but that's another story
hawk
I bought a Planar PV174 at the end of December and so far, haven't looked back. Total price was under $700 including shipping.
.4" is nice to have) and the price was comparable or a little cheaper.
Specs:
* 17.4" LCD. 1280x1024 resolution
* up to 75Hz analog, 60Hz DVI. (as it happens, when running analog I found it preferable to run at 70Hz to avoid some slight flickering)
* Built in speakers (I don't use them)
* Built in USB hub (don't use this either)
* Built in pivot (don't use this - the model is available in black or white with a pivot or clear/translucent red/trans blue without pivot)
* 220cd/m2 brightness
* 400:1 contrast
* 160degree viewing angle
* 25ms refresh (15ms rise, 10ms fall)
Frankly, from the research I did at the time the specs were far better than anything else in the 17" market (not to mention the extra
I have a friend who uses the Planar 15" LCD on his Mac and is also very pleased with the way it performs.
Slashdot? Oh, I just read it for the articles.
I seem to remember (but can't find) an article about a way to lower, by 50%, the refresh rate of an LCD panel. The best part was that it had nothing to do with the physical panel itself, but the hardware used to drive it. I don't even see it mentioned here, so what happened to it?
Anyone? Bueller?
"Sometimes a woman is a kind of religion, she can save your soul & set you free from all your sins" - Bad Examples
...can we have 14" Laptop LCD's that can have up to 1600x1200 resolution (via the Dell Inspiron 4100), yet the best these 15" Desktop LCD's (where power is not an issue) can reach is 1024x768.
IMHO, that's f*cked.
no.
The high price of LCDs is a much deeper issue. In a word: yeild. An LCD is basically a very large IC with some crystal on top. Unfortunately, it is hard to get a large IC to come out w/o defects. This is why smaller ICs (such as CPUs) are mass produced with built in testing circuitry to detect errors.
Unfortunately, defect rates rise as the square of the feature size, so a 1x1 inch IC has only 1/4 the defects of a 2x2.
Couple this with a VERY low tolerance for dead pixels (what defects in the IC get you) and you see that the price of a LCD should rise with the square of the size. CRTs have no such scaling issues, so I can't see where your agument that they should technically cost less comes from.
Anyway, this is why LCDs for digital watches cost pennies, and you can buy a 10in LCD for a few bucks, but an Apple Cinema display will set you back a new mortgage.
"Since they rarely use a standard VGA connector, they require a proprietary video card which sometimes will not have open source driver support."
This is absolutely untrue. Most LCD monitors are either driven through analog VGA or through a standard digital interface (DVI.) Of course, the DVI-driven displays will provide higher-quality images.
And what makes you think that OLED cards will have open-source driver support, anyway? IMHO, if the drivers work well, does it really matter if you have the source code? It seems good to try for the utopia of all-open-source, but not purchasing a great monitor just because the drivers aren't open-source seems a bit overboard.
"...dropping an LCD results in a sloppy mess and a couple hundred dollars down the tubes."
Whoa. Stop there. If you spent $200 on an LCD monitor, no wonder you're complaining. The low-end monitors are crappy. I have an SGI 1600SW with Multilink Adapter that will soon be driven by a Geforce3. I spent over $1000 on it, which is more than I have spent on most of my computers. However, it is worth every penny. I would not trade it for any other LCD and I certainly wouldn't wait for a still-vapor technology.
Yes, LCDs are pricey! No, LCDs are not for everyone. But for those of us who want an absolutely gorgeous display -- one that every person who walks into your house will say "Wow!" about, and one that never makes your eyes hurt -- we are more than happy to pay for an LCD.
BTW, I thought this Tom's Hardware article was horrible. Instead of focusing on the wonderful high-end LCDs, this article is dueling the low-end LCDs. Most of these monitors are awful. I would recommend that anyone who is in the market check out the following:
Low-end: IBM T-Series 15" analog
Midrange: Samsung 17" 170MP with built-in TV tuner and PIP
High-end: The SGI 1600SW with Multilink, since discontinued; any Apple LCD
Whatever you do, I wouldn't recommend paying less than $600 for an LCD. Also, definitely read the shopper.com reviews before purchasing. Their thumbs up / thumbs down system is a good way to figure out what people actually thought of the product after bringing it home.
Good luck...
Simpli - Your source for San Jose dedicated servers and colocation!
The difference in size and weight for an equivalent display size is important to me. Large CRTs are just too big and heavy.
I bought a cheap (less than $400) Samsung 15" LCD (model 570V) and I am very happy with it.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
I used to live in a place that was right next to a line of high-voltage power lines. And while that isn't a problem to my health, (a few fradulent scientific studies to the contrary), I was close enough that the magnetic induction would give every CRT in my house a 60 Hz signal on the display, so that the screen would move back and forth according to the beat-signal created with regard to the refresh rate.
While this isn't a problem with TVs (which refresh at 60Hz), it was a MAJOR problem with my 21" Viewsonic CRT display, which, in order to get the benefit of the 1800x1400 display, had to be refreshed at 75Hz (going at 60Hz caused too much flicker on that huge display). Needless to say, trying to read tiny text, when the whole screen is shimmying back and forth at 15Hz was headache-inducing at the very least.
This was when I shelled out the big $$$ and got a nice new SGI LCD (SGI 1600SW. It has a good viewing angle, good contrast ratio, runs at 1600x1024 (enough to display two web pages side-by-side), is light-weight and compact (especially compared to my 75 pound Viewsonic P815), and best of all, had no electron beam!
So if, like me, you have a problem with ambient magnetic fields, then I think that the only solution (until OLEDs come out, of course), is to get an LCD. And they're nice. Really nice. In fact, after seeing my display, all my friends went out and got LCDs as well. The only problem is that they're not nearly as cheap as CRT displays.
I have seen LCD screens with good quality. My wife's laptop has the second LCD that didn't annoy the !$^$ out of me for certain applications. The Apple Cinema Display is the first LCD, although I've only seen it in stores. You probably saw an LCD that wasn't properly set up. Of course, every time I start using a CRT tube, I have to get /it/ set up properly, too, but that's another matter.
There are two things that annoy me about LCD screens. One is the contrast ratio, and the other is refresh rate.
At some point, the LCD manufacturers hit the contrast ratio that made the blacks look black. Before that, a little bit of the backlight would creep through the blacks. It made things look all muddy. It's fine for office applications, programming, and whatnot. But it made any sort of Photoshop usage nearly impossible, even for web design. This has now been almost fixed. The latest expensive displays are good enough to not be annoying. Granted, I still wouldn't spec out a system intended for prepress with one, but they are OK.
What kills them for me right now is resolution. For the same price as a 1280x1024 LCD, I can get either a 17 or a 19 inch CRT that will do at least 1600x1200. I like a big, high resolution screen.
The refresh rate is getting better, but it's still not quite good enough for games. Of course, for an office PC, that's not necessarily a bad thing. It's also great for an office PC because the pixels are very square and very sharp, which makes things easier on the eyes.
But the big thing is that a cheap LCD is going to suck more than a cheap CRT.
Gentoo Sucks
Personally, I would rather have this display than a CRT with the same viewable area.
50lbs for a 21" ?
That's nothing
my monitor weighs 55lbs and it's "only" a 19".
S
I just got a new LCD myself! ViewSonic just released last year their VG191, which is a 19" TFT. It's MVA, 1280x1024, 500:1, 250 nits, and it pivots. I love it very dearly.
http://www.viewsonic.com/products/lcd_vg191.cfm
I got mine for $860, though prices seem to have gone up a little since last week (?). I think this makes it a great alternative to those ridiculously expensive ones like Apple's Cinema display. (Especially since I could not find a GeForce 3 with DVI-out at higher res than 1280x1024).
Anyway, the real point of my post is this: If you go for a high-end LCD, do yourself a favor and get one that *pivots* or at least a VESA wall adaptor. I thought this would just be a kind of fun gimmick, but there really is nothing like reading a webpage in portrait mode. I leave my monitor like that almost all the time, in fact (I like to have a widescreen movie playing across the bottom of the screen and emacs up at the top.
Uhh, what is this some kind of troll?
I upgraded from an Iiyama VisionMaster Pro 17" recently to a NEC 1530V.
Price. Well the NEC cost $100 less than I paid for the Iiyama 3 years ago.
Picture Quality. Outstanding. Much better than the Iiyama. Yes, viewing angle can be a problem, but I rarely have problems. I have one bad pixel on the display, and I notice absolutely no ghosting with games.(RTCW is my fav)
Weight - It weighs like 10 pounds, compared to the 30 my Iiyama weighs.
Durability - I try not to drop my monitors. I highly doubt the Iiyama would fare well if it hit the ground.
Compatibility - It plugs into a standard VGA port. The only other interface I'm aware of is the standard DVI, which I also happen to have on my ATI Radeon card. I'm hoping to buy a second LCD this year that uses the DVI port.
It sounds to me like you have not used LCD panels for about 3-4 years. The newer ones such as my 1530V are quite nice, and even that's been dramatically improved upon with the newest model.
With a resolution of 1600 by 1024 pixels, the Apple Cinema Display delivers twice the brightness, twice the sharpness, and three times the contrast of ordinary displays
Yup, just like those G4 CPU's that are twice as fast as what Intel offers...
Of course they're comparing a 700mhz Pentium 4 to their 700mhz G4. So what kind of shrimpy LCD are they comparing it to now?
Need I mention... The brightness on that thing is 180 cd/m, and Contrast ratio = 300:1... Sucker. They're comparing their monitor to an LCD with brightness of 90 cd/m, and 100:1 contrast?
Stop buying into Apple's hype.
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
I would have liked to have bought an OLED monitor, but the technology is not available or cheap yet.
I can't say much about price (OLED is likely to have the same problem as LED does) or weight (my LCD weighs only 20 lbs, and I never move it anyway?) or durability (??), but basically, it seems like you haven't used a LCD in many years. This year we are standardized on DVI (I certainly would not want to use an analog connector for a digital device, anyway), the monitors are viewable from almost any angle (my VG191 actually is viewable from any angle I've tried) and the picture quality is totally awesome. My monitor, which has close to 4 million pixels (counting separately the Red, Green, and Blue components) has exactly 2 flaws, both in the same (logical) pixel.
I'm not sure if you have an ulterior motive or what, but this post is seriously misinformed. It will probably be the case that OLED is a superior solution in several years, once it has matured, but LCD is already quite mature and there are many reasons to use it.
Though this used to be the case, perhaps, now everyone uses DVI and everything is compatible and great.
(The really-high end LCDs usually need special cards to support their crazy resolutions, and some pivoting LCDs might not work with video cards that don't support strange resolutions like 1024x1280.)
LCDs typically have crisper pixels, use far less power, have no headache-inducing flicker, allow better desktop usage (I gained about a foot when I replaced my 19" CRT with a 19" LCD!), often support pivoting, and are more likely to get you laid.
you would actually decide to not purchase a possibly superior product just because that company's office in FRANCE
Does it matter it happened in France ? It does not make no difference to me. Do French deserve a worse treatment ? Hello ? Ever heard of Global Market ?
And, yes, I would decide not to purchase a superior product based on the actions of the company, if there are alternatives.
-
Roses are #FF0000, Violets are #0000FF, find / -name '*base*' |xargs chown -R us && mv zig greatjustice
I was disappointed by Tom's review, since it seemed to confuse one issue (which LCD monitors are the best within a specific class) with another (whether an LCD or a CRT is a better choice for a particular user). Aside from listing certain specifications, all it seemed to contain was a lot of subjective impressions with a negative slant, presumably because CRTs are the "better" product.
Believe it or not, display quality is only one consideration for someone considering the purchase of a new monitor. In my case, I bought a 17" Samsung 760V (1280x1024 native resolution, 16+ million colors, 160-degree viewable angle in both axes) a few months ago and have been nothing but thrilled. Form factor was the major consideration -- given the weight and depth of a 19" CRT, it would have to be placed in a position which would have forced me to turn my head roughly 40 degrees to the right...for hours at a time. With a 17" LCD, however, the viewable area would be comparable to a 19" CRT, but I would be able to place the LCD monitor directly in front of me on my desk. I don't do image editing, but I do spend a lot of time writing, so the ultra-sharp text display and eyestrain reduction far outweighed the color table limitations of an LCD. Finally, since my system had a decently powerful processor/RAM/video card combination, I didn't anticipate a problem running games at the native resolution. (My guess was a good one -- I have had no trouble running Max Payne and Return To Castle Wolfenstein with full detail without motion trails or image degradation.)
I did some research and took the plunge in the LCD market, but it would have been nice to have a decent side-by-side comparison article to read before buying. (I agree with the earlier poster -- in the store, the monitors are often running at a non-native resolution or are hooked to a computer with a terrible graphics card, making even an in-person evaluation somewhat misleading.) Sadly, Tom's article wouldn't have been helpful in the slightest.
"she says i'm lousy conversation. as if that's supposed to help."
No defective pixels on CRT?
I can testify to precisely the opposite - I had to return a brand new Sony Trinitron 19" (this was about two years ago too, it was pretty chic for those days :) ) because of a non-functioning pixel smack-dab in the middle of it. Even at 1280x1024 resolution, one pixel that is constantly black, is just about the most annoying thing you can come up with.
sic transit gloria mundi
Just as a point, the ghosting you refer to in UT is part of the engine itself; it happens on a CRT too.
Nicotine free Amish .sig.
(my VG191 actually is viewable from any angle I've tried)
Uhhhh.. Ok then. Try 139. Still viewable?
El Karma: excelente(principalmente la suma de moderación hecha a los comentarios de los usuarios)
As a consequence, the LCD monitor's biggest drawback, the lasting afterglow, has been significantly reduced.
They just don't make them like they used to.
My favorite:
NIC Card
It's very instructive to watch with a magnifier while playing with the width and height controls, to see how they map the logical pixels to the physical pixels. Do that, and you'll see the real reason that CRT's look good at different resolutions.
I find it hard to believe you notice compression errors on an MPEG-2 stream upwards of 8 megabits per second (DVD quality). There really shouldn't be any at all.
It is much more likely that the "compression errors" are actually the LCD's poor ability to represent motion. They are notoriously bad at this.
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!